In prior attempts to catch first light over Lake Michigan I have generally been a bit late to capture the richest dawn colors. On Sunday, January 8, a clear and relatively cold morning, I made another attempt, getting to the bluff overlooking the lake at Virmond Park a solid 45 minutes before sunrise.
Here is one of the shots I took of a (now familiar) clump of trees at the edge of the bluff. This time I used a wide-angle view to capture the entire clump, as well as a good portion of the pre-dawn sky.
The real subject of this shot, of course, is the sky, which was displaying a full range of colors from a deep blue high in the sky to a deep red-orange at the horizon.
The remainder of the shots were at the edge of the bluff and just featured lake and sky. Here are a few of those.
The second and third of these shots were taken at more of a telephoto focal length, with the last shot being cropped in a more linear fashion to emphasize the horizon.
Although a close look does reveal some texture in the lake water in these shots, generally speaking, they are about as simple as they can get, Even so, I like them as color abstracts.
Late last year when I had attempted to get crisp images of the horizon, I had concluded that I would never be able to get a shot of a really sharp horizon over the lake because of the amount of humidity in the air. These shots proved otherwise.
I noticed late in the shoot (I say late because the cold was really starting to get to me) that there were a few low clouds over the lake to the south and took a shot that I cropped to feature those clouds.
This is the last shot that I took and for whatever reason does not have the crispness of the others. Moreover, it reflects the fact that the sky was getting lighter and I was losing the deep blue I had been able to capture early in the shoot.
One final note: To try to capture the rich predawn colors, I set the white balance on "cloudy" and underexposed most of the shots by one f-stop.
These are absolutely striking! The third and then the first as my favorites, the trees in the first reminiscent of the winter solstice post photos. (That post is one of my favorites of the latest batch.)
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